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lunes, 23 de julio de 2012

Today it's time to write about a novel that brought to Spain the publishin house Umbriel, a novel from the growing genre called mash-up: Abraham Lincoln, vampire hunter.

The truth is that I was willing this novel, because this new series of stories based in the XIXth century mixed with a pulp touch that was catching my attention, but I must recognice that Pride and prejudice and zombies, Sense and sensibility and sea monsters or Android Karenina (I guess we'll have a review of it in a few days) scared me a little, but with Abraham Lincoln, vampire hunter all my fears have gone away. I can anticipate that it seems to me the perfecto novel.

Maybe the idea of using the american liberator par excelence to give an image of a vampire hunter is not the most common thing all over the world, but in the moment that Seth Grahame-Smith (author that also wrote Pride and prejudice and zombies) opens this book in a first chapter that tells us his own life before this novel and sets us everything we're about to read as something that a misterious character leaves in his hands in a boring evening in a bric-a-brac store... In that moment itself you're hooked, making you to read some kind of fictionalized biography of the sixteenth president of the United States of America, and making you to doubt about which ones of these documents and experiences in his life are real and which ones are not.

The characters are, the most of them, ordinary characters, living in the american continent of the XIXth century, farmers, sellers, sailors... With their own ideology and their own opinions about slavery, that is the main plot where all political and vampire conspiracies are turning around, although the most of the seem to be historical. In the other side, the ficticious ones, at least those who are named as vampires, show a divided image of this society, a thing that I really like, because it's not just Abraham Lincoln against the vampires, but just some of them.

The cover (in the Spanish version), although I'm not supporter of using movie posters, I love it, it's pretty simple and nothing else is needed to make us to understand what kind of book we're taking, and I also think that it gives the perfect idea to show the general atmosphere that involves this story. I also love the illustrations that are along the story, some of them historical, some of them retouched and other ones simply put in context, but simply great. But my favourite part of this novel is the end, when, after going through the whole life of Abraham Lincoln, waiting for the fateful end with the mythical "Sic semper tyrannis", we can see how the world of the United States of America goes on after the shot of John Wilkes Booth.

Summarizing, I think it's the perfect novel, able to mix the real history with the fiction itself, filling historical gaps or contextualizing other ones as the slavery through this element that gives action to it from the very beginning to the very end. And written by Seth Grahame-Smith, known by Pride and prejudice and zombies (now I really want to read this one). I just ask Umbriel (the house that published all those named in the review) to not last too much bringing here Queen Victoria, demon hunter.

lunes, 9 de julio de 2012

Hi once again ^^ Today, thanks to the Spanish publishing house Grupo AJEC, we bring with us a post dedicated to a more or less recent work in the steampunk world: Los horrores del escalpelo by Daniel Mares, the last published work of this author.

In Los horrores del escalpelo we can find a victorian world that, a priori, seems a copy of the XIXth century, but as the time goes by we can see a drastic conversion in a completely steampunk world, with automata, humans, steam-powered androids... Everything seen through the eye of one of the main characters: Raimundo Aguirre, a Spanish man that, after fighting in a war in America, get desfigured and exiled to a circus of horrors, arriving in this way to London where he will be involved, among other conspirations, in the crimes of Jack "the ripper". Ray, accompanied by Leonardo Torres, will learn values that he hadn't seen in the underworld where had lived until then, he will know about friendship, courage, justice... All of them screened by an underworld veil of prostitution, gangs war...

In the first place, I'm going to highlight the most important failure that I find, and it's that it's a quite thick book with a tiny letter, as it happens in Game of Thrones, so it's hard to carry with you to read at any moment if you like it, and I think that it could have been perfectly divided in three books, because we can find different stories that are continuously crosslinkins and finish in a common end. However, I must say in its favour that it's a well written novel, and that's why it's not hard to read and it's enough to take the book to devour a bunch of pages. In spite of that, it's not just a novel, but it's also a good travel around the XIXth century history, and that's why this story begins around a century and a half after the crimes of the ripper, so, this is a very deep research work (although sometimes it suffers of and overload of information). But what I enjoyed the most was the main character, Raimundo Aguirre, because he appears from the very first moment and, although you don't understand why does he talk about a war in America when you know he's going to end in the underworld of London, as the time goes by you can understand why he is as he is and, without being a usual hero, you get to take love to him, in spite of Lento y Lento (Long and Slow), a Spanish and an English writers that visit Raimundo to know the secrets of the autumn of 1888, two characters, the less, funny.

Summarizing, I think this novel mixes Mary Shelley, Dickens and Conan Doyle seen through the eyes of a contemporary Spanish Bram Stoker. If you have time and calm, I encourage you to read it, although, as I said in the beginning, don't take it a an only work, but a trilogy summarized in an only book.

If you have already taken a look to it, come here and tell us what you think about it. See you in the next post ^^